East Coast goes dark as Hurricane Sandy makes New York landfall

NEW YORK - Hurricane Sandy methodically knocked out power across the East Coast Monday night, with hundreds of thousands of customers losing electricity as the superstorm made landfall.

Consolidated Edison Co. of New York CEO Kevin Burke said that it was likely the utility would shut off power to thousands of customers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn before the expected storm surge peak around 8 p.m. Monday. ConEd officials called the move unprecedented, and said it was necessary to prevent serious damage to equipment. If the company didn't beat Hurricane Sandy to the underground lines, the power could be off for weeks instead of days, officials said.

Some 126,000 ConEd customers - a single customer can mean an entire building, not just an individual household - already were without power on Monday night. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued to caution people to stay indoors.

"It's going to get worse this evening," Bloomberg said. "Conditions are going to be very dangerous outside. It's not nasty; this is dangerous."

A jogger who was hospitalized after a falling tree limb hit her will recover, Bloomberg said. As of Monday evening, New York City reported no fatalities related to the storm. In New Jersey, 156,000 customers were without power by 5:30 p.m. Officials with Public Service Electric & Gas and the National Weather Service said the number of outages in the state would increase dramatically overnight. PSE&G had nearly 1,000 out-of-state contractors ready to respond to damage.

By nightfall, Connecticut Light & Power was reporting more than 271,000 customers without power. Boston area outages had exceeded 150,000. PECO reported as many as 100,000 or more outages in the Philadelphia region. In Washington, D.C., PEPCO said 17,365 customers were in the dark.

"It's as bad a storm as we have seen, modern day," Bloomberg said. "The difference is, today we're prepared for it. In the olden days, you would have had lots of fatalities."